Personal chat has become immensely popular for personal use, but chat is less popular in the workplace. At work, chat is primarily used within teams and groups of people who already know each other. Personal chat is generally triggered from buddy lists between people who know each other. The current design and feature set of chat systems may be insufficient to support work-context based and enterprise wide communication and collaboration between members of an organization who do not know one another. This study analyzes a regularly appearing enterprise use case and proposes five design extensions to the traditional chat systems that would make these systems more useful in the enterprise environment. The Oracle Applications User Experience team’s attempt is to facilitate enterprise wide collaboration between unknown members. We tested this new proposed chat designs using an HTML and JavaScript prototype with nine enterprise users and report the findings in this paper.

Date: Tuesday, August 28, 2012Conference Session V: Understanding Communication and Work [15:20 - 16:40]Location: International Conference Hall at Hokkaido University